[Plugin: Edit Flow] A pool of assignments that authors can call dibs on?

I’m looking for a way for admins and editors to create a pool of assignments unassigned to any author, until an author comes along and calls ‘dibs’ on the post. I guess it’s someone close to the ‘pitch’ custom status you’ve got, but it still isn’t quite the same because pitches start with an author selected.

Also, for bonus points, I would love the ability to set how many ‘dibs’ each author got during a given period of time.

We’ve mostly got straight assignments figured out (when an author is decided ahead of time) and when the authors have their own ideas (calling ‘dibs’ on a random topic), but we’ve got no solution for an ongoing pool of assignments that we’d like our authors to write.

If you’re willing to let authors edit_others_posts, you could create a new user called Unassigned, assign your pool of wannabe stories to that user, and then let you authors filter the calendar or story budget to see Unassigned’s posts. They could stake their claim simply by editing a post to assign it to themselves.

I think mcstevem’s solution would work best for now, although I’m intrigued by what this functionality might look like. If you want, feel free to prepare a couple wireframes of how you think it might work.

Yeah that was the solution I thought of at first, but I just know that at some point we’d screw up and send a post out authored by ‘Unassigned’. That would be easily fixed by just checking for that name should it ever make it in my templates and replacing with ‘Staff’, but I think in the long run I’d much rather have a more robust system.

I’d loooove to draw up some wireframes that shows what I’m after. I’ve got a few other ideas I’d like to see in Edit Flow, care if I toss them in? Or should I make new threads?

Some background on me: I run http://androidandme.com. We’ve got about 8 authors, 2 story editors, and 1 copy editor. We post about 8 times per day.

I think this flow would be really useful for us, as our editors and admins are usually the best at creating a good headline, inserting an appropriate post image, etc. I think if the admins could line up a bunch of posts with some post details already perfected we’d see an explosion of targeted content out of our authors (something that currently takes a lot of planning and emails).

We’re in the middle of a shift in content strategy and having some sort of pool would make the process much smoother.

For now, I’ll probably just give it a shot with a shell user called ‘Unassigned’, like you guys suggested.

I was also hoping this feature would be part of the “Pitch” status, so it’s definitely something we’d love to see.

Every morning I would envisage loading up a bunch of “pitch” article titles, and then our reporters would “claim” and write them. Once a post had been “claimed”, it would be their article (e.g. another author couldn’t just steam in and change the author name – which the solution offered at the start of this thread would mean).

I’m loving the direction of this. We’ve tried to use assignment desk (now defunct) w/ edit-flow to get this feature set, but it never worked right.

A bonus feature that I would really like to see is for each thing in the pool to have the ability to be claimed (dibs) by a certain number of people from each role. So the story takes 1 photographer, 1 reporter and 1 editor, all three can claim dibs on it, then it becomes a post.

Your code snippet might make for a good secondary plugin. If you want to put it in a Github repo, I’d be happy to help you improve it. There are some security and best practices issues to be concerned about.